While there has been significant progress in simulating collisions between rigid bodies, much remains to be done for modeling interactions between soft bodies, see Lin et al., “Collision detection between geometric models: a survey,” Proc. IMA Conference on Mathematics of Surfaces, 1998. Graphical techniques for representing and deforming soft bodies range from non-physical, e.g., control point-based, to physically plausible, e.g., free form deformation (FFD), to physically realistic, e.g., finite element methods (FEM), see Gibson et al., “A survey of deformable modeling in computer graphics,” MERL Technical Report, TR97-19, 1997.
All of these techniques require three basic operations to model interactions between soft bodies: 1) detecting collisions between deformable bodies, 2) computing impact forces when the bodies collide, and 3) determining deformation forces or contact deformation of the bodies to initialize a deformation procedure.
It is desired to perform all three operations quickly, with efficient use of memory, and more accurately than known methods. In addition, it is desired that the results of these operations can be used by any of the know deformation techniques stated above.